Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-11-29/Deletion report

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http://notabilia.net
I'll have to take a look at those when I get home. That one about analyzing 2 million AfDs is very strange if true (there have been a little under 500,000 from 2005 to 2021, and even if you assume that some pre-2005 discussions were held without their own separate pages, I don't think there should be 1.5 million of them). Were they using multiple projects? jp×g 03:43, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Good point - the headline there was relying on the paper's abstract ("an analysis of 1,967,768 AfD discussions between 2005 and 2018"), but in the "Data Collection" they explain more precisely that this means "1,967,768 recommendations" in the sense of "votes"...
Anyway, the underlying corpus was published (by other authors) here: https://github.com/emayfield/AFD_Decision_Corpus . It might be interesting to compare the metadata they extracted with your own.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:57, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • The Oracle data is very cool, thank you for putting that and this report together. Levivich 03:48, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Another rather nice visualisation is http://notabilia.net with left spiralling lies indicating 'keep' votes and right spiralling lines indicating 'delete'. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 04:15, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • I remember the Michael Z. Williamson afd, I see it got an honorable 22:d place.
  • working your ass off on an article only to see it flushed down the drain is close to an official rite of passage around these parts Is that really the case? I've created around 120 articles and never had one deleted and only once or twice had to defend one at AfD. Is that unusual? Am I naïve to believe that if you pick a notable subject, make sure you've got enough material to write a few hundred words, and cite your sources, that your new article will be largely immune from AfD? HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 21:21, 1 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Only one of my 156 articles has been deleted, which was probably me flying too close to the sun on a current-events BLP (I was banking on continued coverage which never materialized). Sure, it deserved to go, but I'll be damned if I didn't feel a little regretful about the whole thing. I remember hearing a maxim once along the lines of "if you've never missed the bus before, you're showing up to the bus stop too early" -- maybe the same is true here. Well, I've missed the WP:GNG bus once, so now I know how long to wait :) jp×g 03:51, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      Old Swedish saying, translated: Better to hear the sound of a bowstring breaking, than to never attempt to draw a bow. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:42, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

AfD[edit]

The lack of mention of immense canvassing across the internet and even by media articles being written seems rather wrong. Not only 4chan, but also people like Larry Sanger have been canvassing to get the article kept. Isn't all of that something that would be appropriate to mention, especially as a reason on why the AfD is so big? SilverserenC 18:16, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I did mention that it'd been picked up by a few blogs (the Fox story came after this article was published). I think it's a stretch to call the 4chan thread "canvassing" -- maybe there was another one that nobody's linked to, but the one I see on the talk page header for that AfD had only six posts, all within one hour, after which point it dropped off the board into oblivion. A typical thread on a high-traffic board will get hundreds of replies, so that would have been a very unsuccessful thread even by >2011 standards. jp×g 23:57, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Is media coverage considered canvassing? Are critics of WP considered canvassing if they're not contributing to the project? I may be mistaken but I don't think that was the intent of WP:CANVASSING. When a controversial topic is up for deletion, it will naturally garner public attention and people will talk about it. Regardless, the AfD is in the process of being closed as I type this reply. Atsme 💬 📧 20:41, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Much of the media attention was solicited by the groups that were indeed trying to canvass and were the reason why so many newly made accounts showed up. Not to mention dormant accounts that hadn't edited for months or years. Again, isn't all of that something that should be mentioned in regards to the AfD and why it became so big? SilverserenC 20:48, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Dormant accounts probably have more to do with socking than canvassing. Publicity and the opinions that are shared off-wiki are just that, which is not a violation of canvassing to my knowledge, unless an involved editor is behind it; i.e., an actual WP editor has to be the "canvasser" and I'm not aware of that happening. Publicity brings people in and I don't see a work-around for that, much less consider it good reason to dismiss the AfD. In fact, it would be great if more people showed up at AfDs instead of just 3 or 4 involved editors making a final determination to keep or delete an article. Atsme 💬 📧 21:10, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    In regards to publicity bringing in people, I definitely agree. For me, Rama's preliminary statement in the arbitration case about them seems worth mentioning as an example. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 07:26, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • I keep hearing about all these canvassed votes, but it is not easy to find one. I did see an IP vote, but it appears to have been removed. A couple of days ago I checked the article stats and there were a total of 11 IP *edits*, but I don't see them on the page now (it's a bit hard to say for sure on a page this size). So I just checked 15 keep votes (willy-nilly, or "random"). All of them had recently edited, *before the AfD started* I didn't count how many edits they had before the AfD this year, but it was generally a couple of screen-fuls+, i.e. over 200. Well there are about 150 keep votes. So can anybody find one of these canvassed keep voters (user names please)? Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:37, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • Sure, @Smallbones:, we can start with the person who voted right before you did: User:Gumaaaa and then move on to others including User:Volatile.memory, User:ChronosTruth, User:Johnathan 2001, User:Delhatch, User:Gnuthomson, User:Redderc, User:Rocket in the sky, and User:Cedric Contra. Just as an example. SilverserenC 23:51, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • I just had some time to review the !votes. My rough count is 143 keep, 39 delete. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I did check out *all* the !votes with red-linked signatures on the page. You managed to get all one side but not the other. My count on these 16 "!votes" was 2 comments (not !votes), 8 (most of the ones above) look like their first edits, and 6 who have many edits before the AfD and look like regular editors who just don't have a user page. So you've reduced the margin to 135 keep, 39 delete." I trust the closers will check these all out in much more detail. But I very much doubt the deletes will ever overcome the deficit. Smallbones(smalltalk) 04:33, 1 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

My personal opinion is that admin corps is generally overburdened, sometimes leading to actions that are hastier than they ideally might be. Scores of AfDs must be closed every day, some requiring an hour or some few hours to consider (which in a few cases may not be provided -- a symptom of the overburden, perhaps). Surely this is a significant timesink for our fine but very busy admin corps. We do have Wikipedia:Non-admin closure, but this is only useful in a few cases.

There is an open discussion (started by yours truly) of an idea to address this, at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#Adding "AfD closer" status, in which participation is here invited. Herostratus (talk) 22:05, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • A major problem may have to do with fairness. This was the fourth AfD for the page, at least one more than maybe should be allowed. If a page has been saved two times, and then goes for broke again, with all three keeping the page either by Keep or No Consensus, then a "let's really get it this time!" fourth AfD ignores that enough editors have spoken or commented with silence. When articles have successfully gone through the gauntlet numerous times, triple-jeopardy seems as far as we should take it. Randy Kryn (talk) 22:10, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Never mind canvassing, call it what it is: fake news. There's no such thing as a "moderator". Anybody [not banned/blocked] can nominate a page for deletion, the omission of which (whether due to malice or lack of basic journalistic research) renders all implications by these news sources completely wrong. Other overtly misleading nonsense permeates the other content.
    The news here is that an unremarkable discussion by a direct democracy over how best to arrange freely available information that the same community actually wrote resulted in... nothing (at least not yet, and probably not at all). That a University of Cambridge historian compares compares this to Holocaust denial is rather unsurprising to me given my experience of such people. It reminds me of a right-wing backlash to undergraduates at an Oxford college choosing to rearrange the portraits in their private common room that made the front page of the Daily Mail: in both cases, the idea is that a conspiracy of censorship emerges when, after a group of people choose to take an action, the very same group of people choose to change or update their decision. However, it is one of the stupidest comments I have read in recent months. (Another strong contender is a tweet by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, that implies that he is hearing of WP:SYNTH for the first time in this AfD.) Actually stupider than anything in a far-right reddit subreddit that weighed in on the issue, which is quite the achievement. — Bilorv (talk) 22:30, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Never fear - WP always makes room for the far left's counterbalance. Perhaps a paragraph from this perspective should be included in the article subject of this discussion, and vice versa. Just a thought...Atsme 💬 📧 23:57, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • So far as I can discern, this bears no relation to my comment. — Bilorv (talk) 21:22, 30 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think it's fair to hold mainstream news outlets to lofty Signpost standards... understanding of the project seems to be in pretty short supply across the wider Internet. For example, there are about ten thousand Google news results for wikipedia moderators (and 31 for "Wikipedia moderators" in quotes). Heck, even the New York Times references Wikipedia having "moderators". If anything, I appreciate stuff like this, because it inches us a little closer to breaking our Gell-Mann amnesia... jp×g 00:07, 30 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Good journalism is in short supply in the modern day, and generally found in obscure gems within the field of non-mainstream or specialist news sources. Such as The Signpost, of course. — Bilorv (talk) 21:22, 30 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • One one hand, I emailed The Daily Caller regarding their story to ask for a correction; they seem to have additionally gotten the date on when the article was tagged for deletion wrong. While I included the link to the diff where the deletion notice was added, I've yet to see anything corrected. On the other hand, to lump in the report from The Telegraph as "fake news" seems like a stretch-and-a-half. — Mhawk10 (talk) 06:25, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Fiddling around with a wrong date in a Daily Caller article is moving deckchairs on the Titanic. I've had The Guardian and similarly reputed publications refuse to address simple corrections I've emailed to notify them of, like dates and numbers, so I'm not surprised at the lack of response there. The Daily Caller article doesn't seem worse (if anything, it's better) than the corresponding Telegraph article—and that is not meant as a compliment to the former. — Bilorv (talk) 21:14, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Is it expected that when someone is mentioned in a 'report' that they be notified? ~ cygnis insignis 06:47, 30 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • No. Our policy is to get the facts right. If you are mentioned, e.g. in "The current AfD, nominated on November 22 by cygnis insignis" and we are certain that you indeed did nominate the article for AfD (see link in that section), then we likely won't contact you. If there is some controversy involved about what the facts are, we likely will ask you for a comment. Of course anybody who does have a comment (even if they aren't mentioned) can comment here, but please don't use that as an excuse to just keep a controversy going here that has been addressed ad nausem in other places. So, first question: did The Signpost get the facts right? If so you probably don't want to complain to us. Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:13, 1 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Cygnis insignis: This is the first article I've written for the Signpost, and I ended up having to throw the part about that AfD together at the last minute (since it wasn't showing up in AfD logs until a day or two before the publication deadline). If it weren't so rushed, I probably would have thrown a ping on the talk page or something. But as Smallbones says above, there wasn't a whole lot of commentary on your specific role in it (just that you were the one who made the nomination), so I'm not sure there would have been much to dispute or amend. jp×g 06:53, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • JPxG. Thanks for the insightful article. Quick question. It says that 62% of AFDs close delete and 20% close keep. What does the rest of the pie chart look like? What percent are redirect, merge, draftify, no consensus? I ask because I want to calculate the % of articles that are deleted including alternatives to deletion. I suspect that number is much higher than 62%. Thanks. –Novem Linguae (talk) 01:21, 8 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • JPxG. The prose you quote from WP:SPORTSEVENT is a result of the students' efforts as we both found the previous prose confusing. So a beneficial consequence of this incident has been that I think the notability guideline is now more clear. -Reagle (talk) 17:35, 8 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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